Carey Toane

Carey Toane is a librarian, journalist and poet. Her first collection of poems, The Crystal Palace, was published in 2011 by Mansfield Press. She lives in Toronto, where she is currently working on a collection of poems inspired by and dedicated to Twin Peaks. She is on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/careygrrl

You can contact Carey throughout the month of May at writer@openbooktoronto.com

Journalist, poet and librarian-in-training Carey Toane is our May 2015 writer-in-residence! She has lived all over the world and returned to Canada shortly before the publication of her first poetry collection The Crystal Palace with Mansfield Press under the imprint of venerable poet and editor Stuart Ross.
An active force in the literary community, Carey is the founding director of the Pivot Reading Series at the Press Club, as well as the co-founder of Toronto Poetry Vendors, a program which distributes poetry around the city in reclaimed vending machines.

Carey Toane’s much-anticipated first collection of poetry starts at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. Through this early world’s fair, Toane examines our current relationship to our man-made and natural environments. This eclectic, adventurous work, blurring the lines of two centuries of human folly and achievement, is filled with curious animals, anachronisms, and anxieties galore.

Recent Writer In Residence Posts

Dear reader, this is my last post as writer-in-residence. It’s been a slice, and I’m sorry it’s over. I leave the last word to the funny and talented author and co-founder of one of my favourite literary magazines, The Puritan, Spencer Gordon.

Sam Hiyate is president of The Rights Factory, a boutique literary agency in Toronto. In his 24-year publishing career, he has worked at literary magazines, small presses and with New York Times bestselling authors, editing, publishing and representing everything from debut fiction, memoir and narrative non-fiction to graphic novels. He has taught writing and publishing for 15 years privately and also at various universities.

I talked with Sam about TV adaptations and the stories he'd like to see on the small screen.

Poetry about television isn’t something you see done often, but kevin mcpherson eckhoff pulled it off in his chapbook “Game Show Reversed” (Bookthug).

As the title suggests, the long poem is a transcription of an early episode of Wheel of Fortune flipped on its head, so the reader starts at the end with the credits (can’t you see them in your head already?) and announces the winner before you even meet her. (Spoiler: it’s Lynda!)

I asked Kevin to tell me a bit about the chapbook and his gameshow-watching habits. Check out their biography his latest collection out from Bookthug this spring.

Last week I looked at how shifting formats from graphic novel to film changed the subtext of Ghost World and Persepolis. This week I’m taking on two British comics that have been made into films: Tank Girl and Kick-Ass.

As soon as I decided I wanted to interview writers about TV, I knew I wanted to talk to Andy Burns. I recently read his engrossing examination of Wrapped In Plastic: Twin Peaks from ECW Press. Andy was nice enough to chat with me over email about David Lynch’s freaky fabulous show, and other related distractions.

Inspired by my conversation with Merril Collection librarian Lorna Toolis, I started thinking about how a shift from book into film can change the subtext of a graphic novel. I’m thinking generally here of how comics occupy a middle ground between books and film – more explicitly visual than a text-based book but less so than a movie. As such, a graphic novel as format exists in this liminal, outsider space that is often reiterated by the content: misfits, rebels, masked marauders, loners, and freaks.

Happy Tuesday! Author and illustrator Evan Munday answers our Writers on TV survey, in which I ask Toronto authors, editors, agents and others to tell us a bit about their personal reading and viewing habits.

Name: Evan Munday

Recent work: The Dead Kid Detective Agency book series, the third of which, Loyalist to a Fault, will be in stores this September.

One of the best things about this writer-in-residence gig is using it as an excuse to interview smart people who are doing interesting things somehow related to books and TV. This week's feature interviewee is writer Rupinder Gill, who I wanted to talk to about the difference between writing for TV and books.

As part of our Books and TV theme, I invited Toronto authors, editors, agents and others to tell us a bit about their personal reading and viewing habits. First up, poet, screenwriter and The Rusty Toque editor Kathryn Mockler.

I'll just say/ I started watching Frazier/ I'll just say/ Every single episode
-David McGimpsey, Asbestos Heights

It started in grad school. I had moved from Brooklyn to sleepy, manicured London, Ontario to study 16 hours a day for 12 months. From the outside my life looked pretty good. My book of poems came out that fall, the same fall I wrote 17 papers in 13 weeks. There was a short and well-organized publisher tour, but to be honest, I don't remember much about it except that I paid so dearly for the time off when I returned to classes.

One late afternoon many summers ago, I found myself on a sunny balcony with a bunch of writers. Naturally we were talking about television. When one of us admitted she hadn't seen The Wire, I jumped in with the kind of enthusiasm that comes with being two beers in on a sunny balcony after a long winter of mainlining all five seasons of The Wire. "Blah blah Idris Elba blah blah Omar. It's a layer cake of society, with an arc like a symphony, written to completion before it was aired," I crowed. "It's the Great American Novel!"